I can see this technique being adopted by spammers converting “Buy Cialis from Canadian” into html instead of embedding an image.

On the flip side this may be an alternate way to obfuscate Captcha’s. Bots can defeat Captcha’s by identifying the image in the source code and running OCR on it. Embedding the Captcha as an html table can make it more difficult for the bots to isolate it and scrape it. This would just look like part of the html to a robot. If you embedded random non visible html elements into the captcha it would further the obfuscation. Make the coloring dependent upon CSS styles and the bot would have to know how to parse css. Apply the styles after the page is displayed via JavaScript and the bot has to run JavaScript.

Randomly switch between variations of this method, and regular image captchas and the bot has to stay on it’s toes prepared to process whatever comes it’s way.

The bot’s only hope then is to fully render the page as a browser would and then OCR the right area of the page. It doesn’t completely get rid of the possibility to bypass it, but it does make it a more expensive operation.

This is crazy, but I think it was an animator and a programmer playing around together making it Look like they really did this, when in fact it is just animation with and tags flying up the text editor window.